A real disruptor or a big talker? The Myth of LeEco - <AUTHOR> http://www.chinatechinsights.com/feature/0937538.html <comment><USER2> My personal experience with Le people.

Overall impression: incompetent people with truckloads of cash; well, just like any other company that managed to secure a dominant position in any market niche in China. In their case it was "Chinese soap operas on demand". My girlfriend was offered a "personal secretary" position in their Russian office. Amazingly, they appointed a Chinese C-level for their Russian office who does't speak any foreign language at all. Weighting all pros, and cons, I dissuaded her from taking it and never regretted my decision.

So what do they want to push in Russia? The same Chinese soap operas, but with computer translated Russian subtitles. They ran a ~50-70 people operation in Russia for close to a year, just to invite tons of market entry consultants, make a single landing page, and do a 1 few weeks trial run of their Russian website.</comment>


US academics say their shardy blockchain will be 10X faster than Visa - <AUTHOR> https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2019/01/17/us-academics-say-their-shardy-blockchain-will-be-10x-faster-than-visa/ <comment><USER2> _" hope it will be able to process as many as 10,000 transactions per second, which far surpasses Visa's capability to process around 1,700"_

I think somebody got bad info about VISA's capabilities. 1700/tps is probably their average tps over a day...solely based on needs/demands...not what it could do. Not the peak, and not the edge of their performance envelope. It's likely they can already handle much more than the proposed 10k/sec of this sharded block chain.

Edit: Yep...pretty sure someone started with "Visa does roughly 150M transactions a day"[1] then did 150,000,000 / 24 / 60 / 60 = ~ 1736

[1] [https://mybroadband.co.za/news/security/190348-visanet- handl...](https://mybroadband.co.za/news/security/190348-visanet- handling-100000-transactions-per-minute.html)

<comment><USER3> Those are old numbers. According to the VISA Annual Report from 2017, the VISA network does ~3500 transactions per second (tps) (average) [0] and a "FactSheet" put out by VISA claims 65,000 peak tps [1].

And AliPay had ~325,000 peak tps according to their 2017 annual report [2].

[0] [https://s1.q4cdn.com/050606653/files/doc_financials/annual/2...](https://s1.q4cdn.com/050606653/files/doc_financials/annual/2017/Visa-2017-Annual- Report.pdf)

[1] [https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate/media/visan...](https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate/media/visanet- technology/aboutvisafactsheet.pdf)

[2] [https://www.alibabagroup.com/en/news/press_pdf/p180201.pdf](https://www.alibabagroup.com/en/news/press_pdf/p180201.pdf)

<comment><USER4> If you were able to quickly find these numbers, and if those "academics" can't get latest facts right...

Good golly, articles like this drive me nuts. False future hyped promise.

My team __shipped __over the last 4 years, and our system has already done ~3300 transactions per second (tps) (average) __in production __on $99 worth of P2P hardware.

Internet Archive, top 300 global site, is also running it in production as well. I just gave a talk there about how to do distributed load testing in a decentralized network: [https://youtu.be/hYH2Z1A0x3c?t=3635](https://youtu.be/hYH2Z1A0x3c?t=3635)

More info about production-ready use cases at [https://github.com/amark/gun](https://github.com/amark/gun) .

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "The mainstream public is aware that these networks don't scale."

The mainstream public is barely aware that these networks exist.

<comment><USER6> More importantly I don't see any reason why VISA couldn't scale arbitrarily to accommodate however many transactions.

<comment><USER7> In distributed systems, there are almost always bottlenecks hiding right behind the system's empirical limit.

<comment><USER6> My point is that scale and speed of transaction doesn't seem to be VISA's problem.

VISA et. al. have scaled massively over the last 20 years, in ways that would have been unimaginable before.

Given that a VISA is just a 'number' with some 'info' on it, I don't see what any existential bottlenecks might be.

Maybe some things were centralized, but now are distributed ...

But given that each VISA is issued by a financial entity like a bank, which can manage it like any other account ... I just don't see the problem here.

I don't want to trounce creative thinking but most of this blockchains stuff is just academic for now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I applaud this effort as an academic project. Hopefully it will help move forward the state of the art. But I reject the idea that a new cryptocurrency will "fix the bitcoin problem" by just being faster.

But there are already several blockchains that promise high transactions per second such as Neo, Eos, Nano, etc. And Ripple, which has been around significantly longer than these, claims to be able to handle 50k transactions per second.

Cryptocurrencies need a lot of adoption and real world use to be successful. Beware of premature optimization.

<comment><USER9> Here's what you need:

* faster processing (and confirmation if you're forking)

* smaller blockchains (solved by coda protocol)

* insurances for light-weight wallets (solved by coda protocol)

* not computationally heavy (solved by algorand)

After that, real-world use-cases will follow. If bitcoin had been invented before online banking, it would have boomed. The fact that it came later puts a lot of pressure on innovation in this space. If it fails to innovate, we won't hear about blockchains in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Prediction, sharded blockchains will never take off. With newer blockchain protocols like MimbleWimble, you do not need to store the full transaction details for all time. Too many things to go wrong, too brittle...

This is a much better scalability technique on a single blockchain -- taking advantage of zk-proofs and EC point encoding. If you want distributed computation also, ala Eth/EOS, you could combine a zk-proof of computation with the MW tx encoding with no loss of generality.

<comment><USER11> prediction: blockchain will never take off

<comment><USER10> sorry, but it already has. Censorship resistant money aka Bitcoin exists and works today!

<comment><USER12> Bitcoin is something i only ever read about. I work in tech and consider myself quite savvy. Never have i needed to own crypto or to make a transaction using crypto as the exchange media.

Explain how its "taken off already"?

<comment><USER13> Never have I needed to either however I almost always see a way to use some common cryptocurrency whenever I decide to pay for something or make a donation. In that sense I think it has taken off. You don't have to use it for anything however you can for most everything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> >it will be able to process as many as 10,000 transactions per second, which far surpasses Visa's capability to process around 1,700.

According to Visa

VisaNet handles an average of 150 million transactions every day and is capable of handling more than 24,000 transactions per second. ([https://usa.visa.com/run-your-business/small-business- tools/...](https://usa.visa.com/run-your-business/small-business- tools/retail.html))

</comment><comment><USER15> I guess my unpleasant exposure to this domain has affected my brain, because I first read "shady blockchain"... Aren't most of them? Whoops!

</comment><comment> _-___________-_ Is Visa's network not fast enough? I've never had problems with the amount of time the transaction takes when paying for something with my Visa cards.

<comment><USER16> They're probably comparing to it because it often comes up in critiques of current cryptos - which are incredibly slow compared to Visa.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Cryptocurrency's reputation being what it is, they will hopefully come up with a descriptor that is less similar to "shady."

<comment><USER18> Yeah, I was going to go with the ol' "I read it as..." and suffer the downvotes. But in this case I think it apropos. Because I did, in fact, read it as "shady blockchain" and where as I would normally stop and say, "wait, that can't be right...", in this case I just kept on reading without skipping a beat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This article does not explain why sharding the history reduces the time it takes for a transaction to end up in a block. It also does not mention that this delay is exacerbated by the standard practice of waiting for several blocks to be mined on top of a transaction to reduce the chances of a fork that renders it invalid.

</comment><comment><USER19> This article is less informative than the one it is citing.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-17/mit- stanf...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-17/mit-stanford- academics-design-cryptocurrency-to-better-bitcoin)

</comment><comment><USER20> For anyone interested in more information, I found the research paper[0] and website for the currency named "Unit-e"[1]. The paper seems to be quite extensive at 168 pages long and covers a lot more than the blockchain design.

[0] [https://dtr.org/wp- content/uploads/2019/01/2019-01-16-Decent...](https://dtr.org/wp- content/uploads/2019/01/2019-01-16-Decentralized-Payment-Systems-Principles- and-Design.pdf) [1] [https://dtr.org/unit-e/](https://dtr.org/unit-e/)

</comment><comment><USER21> Projects like Zilliqa have a massive head start

<comment><USER22> Yes I thought this article was going to be about Zilliqa, which is also created by academics, has sharding, and is releasing its mainnet at the end of this month.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Blockchain solves yet another non-problem!

Next up: "Blockhain makes it easier to press the button on your blender"

<comment><USER9> If Bitcoin was released before online banking, would you have said the same?

<comment><USER6> "If Bitcoin was released before online banking, would you have said the same?"

That's a non-sequitor, because as long as the world is 'online' there can effectively be 'online banking'.

And of course we need 'online' to have Bitcoin.

Are you suggesting people did Bitcon by mail?

One day we might find something useful for it to do, but not for a while.

Let's stop wasting vast amounts of electricity until we figure out something useful for it to do, as of today, there are none.

<comment><USER9> > That's a non-sequitor, because as long as the world is 'online' there can > effectively be 'online banking'.

Of course, but online banking has been bad for a very long time (it's still bad in the US, you can't easily transfer money around compared to Europe). Bitcoin was effectively better than banking before a certain point in history, and worked out of the box without all the banking infrastructure, it would have won back then.

> Let's stop wasting vast amounts of electricity until we figure out something > useful for it to do, as of today, there are none.

It shows that you know nothing about cryptocurrencies. The innovation and current research in the field tackles, among other issues, the energy issue of bitcoin. (Check Algorand for an example.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> ITT: my favorite blockchain that my favorite youtube guru happened to expose me to first is the best solution, and all others are scams because I was exposed to them second

so basically religion.</comment>


E3: Cops called to shutdown Ouya - <AUTHOR> http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/06/12/e3-2013-cops-7called-to-shut-down-ouya

<comment><USER2> Interesting story, but the URL is borked. This one works for me: [http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/06/12/e3-2013-cops- called-t...](http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/06/12/e3-2013-cops-called-to- shut-down-ouya)

</comment><comment><USER3> Not really a story. Ouya cheaps out, doesn't pay for an E3 booth. Acts surprised when their booth outside the event is reported.

It's fun to play up the David v. Goliath story, but this isn't it.</comment>


Show HN: App Reviews Analysis and Summarization - <AUTHOR> https://sensortower.com/ios/us/evernote/app/evernote/281796108#review-stats

<comment><USER2> Very nice, from what I can see.

Is this only targeted for authors of apps, not consumers? Because I'm a little confused by the sign-up requirements for viewing more data, but with the restriction on sign-ups for authors of apps:

> _Please add an app before continuing_

> _If you haven 't released an App, add your closest competitor instead_

> _If we can 't find your App, paste the iTunes id or URL of the App_

On the surface, this seems like anyone could benefit from this data. But if it's meant to just be for authors, seems like a lot of missed opportunity.

Or am I misunderstanding the whole point?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a great point. The tools are more oriented towards people who make apps or market them (or need to have stats/data about the apps). We do power via API access consumer sites that surface this data for users, but we leave it up to them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> So, I just signed up. I have a trivia game I just launched and I'm trying to boost downloads and IAPs (downloads are actually pretty good).

I really like what I see but I'm trying to understand where I get my $35+/mo of value. What do review analysis & search ranking do for me (that I can't get by just browsing the app store)? How do I convert the data you give into more downloads?

I don't mean any of this as a knock. Your product looks great and I'm willing to put my money behind tools that will help my app.

<comment><AUTHOR> One reliable way to get users on the app store is to pay for advertising based installs, which for free apps end up costing $1-2 per user. At 35/month, if the app store visibility optimization tools and analysis helps you get more downloads. Plus the app planning intelligence, product feedback, researching competitors -- it all saves time.

You could sit down with a notebook and tally where you rank for things every day, but you'd quickly spend much more time on it than the monthly fee is worthwhile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It looks useful....IF your app is already a success and has massive downloads/reviews. For those who only get a review every few days(guessing 95% of apps), how does your service provide value?

<comment><AUTHOR> The idea is to help developers optimize their app's presence in the app store and get more downloads (hence get more reviews). We've had many indie developers use our product (even the free version) and increase downloads dramatically (3-4x).

<comment><USER5> This has been my experience. I 8x'd by downloads by using this site. They've got excellent analytic tools for determining which keywords are important in your market.

EDIT: Responding to grandparent, I only get a review every few days, and I have less than 200 reviews. Nevertheless, this report did provide some interesting insight. Too soon to tell if I'll be able to translate it into a valuable decision. But I like that sensortower has been innovating on ways to analyze your data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Very cool. While you can see (with some mouse-overs) how each version does, I think it's important enough to give it its own section (average rating per version, biggest + an - comments, etc.). Also, keep the touch devices in mind; hiding data under mouse-overs is a nono in this day and age.

</comment><comment><USER7> I like how you can clearly see shifts in opinion in the small graph at the top of the page. The light grey bars indicating the new releases could be a little easier to see though. I was almost going to suggest that as a feature before noticing.

</comment><comment><USER8> The simplicity of data representation is impressive

</comment><comment><USER9> This is a nice missing tool for app developers. Only if I had enough reviews...

</comment><comment><USER10> wow, really valuable data/service</comment>


Why I'm not staking my future on MeteorJS - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@calvinfroedge/why-i-m-not-staking-my-future-on-meteorjs-52e55fbf5332 <comment><USER2> I agree with many of the author's points. But the primary criticism boils down to lock-in. Without lock-in, no matter how many rough edges Meteor has, if it can be swapped out in the future while keeping 95+% of the business logic and rendering code intact, AND if you require real-time sync between users and backend jobs, then it's a no-brainer. Because you can get your MVP up with Meteor, then if you find you need things like account merging, you can make the business decision to rewrite your backend and sync code from scratch without any sunk cost. And modern Meteor (i.e. since this summer) supports this brilliantly.

The reason is that Meteor now has a set of best practices and supported libraries for working with React and NPM. So you can build completely Meteor- agnostic React components (which can access the entire React NPM ecosystem), then have small wrappers that declaratively specify the data subscriptions you need for each view. If you ever want to swap out your backend, you just need to switch how you're feeding props to your component hierarchy, i.e. with a Backbone mixin, Flux, or Relay. (In fact, the subscription code in React- Meteor is very conceptually similar to how Relay's GraphQL declarations work, but it has the benefit of giving you a working backend about 5 minutes after changing client code, rather than waiting 5 months for people to dig into the GraphQL reference implementation.)

For references, see: [https://react-in- meteor.readthedocs.org/en/latest/](https://react-in- meteor.readthedocs.org/en/latest/) and [https://github.com/elidoran/cosmos- browserify/](https://github.com/elidoran/cosmos-browserify/)

It's also very much worth mentioning that with Meteor's first-class support for oplog tailing, you can always just write external microservices (in any language you want) that are kicked off by Meteor and asynchronously make changes to the database. Then all clients will pick up those changes as quickly as their network connections allow. We use this heavily in production with a Kappa Architecture (see: [http://radar.oreilly.com/2014/07/questioning- the-lambda-arch...](http://radar.oreilly.com/2014/07/questioning-the-lambda- architecture.html) ) feeding a Mongo database that is itself a [read-only] Meteor Collection, giving our users real-time visibility into, well, just about everything. The details merit a separate post, but it's a complete joy to write code for.

Cordova is clunky. But there's nothing stopping your React Native app from loading your full client Meteor code into the JavaScriptCore background view, now that React Native polyfills WebSockets ( [https://github.com/facebook/react- native/pull/890](https://github.com/facebook/react-native/pull/890) )... then you'd just need to test for whether your app is being loaded into React Native. And there you have the best of both worlds: React Native for your view, Meteor for your models and controllers.

Oh, and to address the point of "staking the future of your company on a persistent web socket connection between clients and servers scaling in production" \- a very valid criticism of Meteor. But how else were you planning on making all your data real-time in the first place?

Meteor is invaluable for getting real-time apps to market, and if you use React, it's flexible enough if you ever outgrow Meteor's assumptions. And that's a good problem to have.</comment>


Ask HN: If the laws of nature apply to human brains, how can there be free will? - <AUTHOR> If consciousness arises from the electricity flows in our neurons and if these electricity flows obey the laws of physics, isn't free will impossible? <comment><USER2> This question is too nebulous for a good Ask HN.

If you're interested in the millions of pages of literature on this question, you might start at [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/). But TL;DR: there's no answer.

</comment><comment><USER3> Free will is an illusion, our brains make decisions on how to deal with incoming information based on past experiences that have strengthened certain connections. Some circuits are stimulated throughout the day more than others based on similarity of information to what we have received in the past, from this arises thought processes and "decision making"

</comment><comment><USER4> The laws of Physics do not require determinism - in fact, probability is at the heart of quantum physics.</comment>


Our 99th percentile response time went from 4000 ms to sub 10 ms - <AUTHOR> https://nrkbeta.no/2020/05/26/how-our-99th-percentile-response-time-went-from-4000-ms-to-sub-10-ms/ <comment><USER2> Plenty of talented people doing software at NRK. Good with open source as well: [https://github.com/nrkno](https://github.com/nrkno)

Just wish they'd open source their Ludo player. By far one of the best browser audio/video players.</comment>


Yes, We've Seen the Dalton Caldwell Video. What About It? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.earbits.com/online_radio/yes-weve-seen-the-dalton-caldwell-video-what-about-it/

<comment><USER2> Gem (edited);

 _"Artists, especially small ones, don't have any money."_

[M]ost musicians I know spend $60-300 a month on weed. That's more than most Americans spend on gas!

A fine read, but a bit defensive, and insider-y. Who is this written for? I saw that video he's writing about, and... now that he mentions it, yeah! How _do_ they get over those hurdles? Which is my point: who is the likely reader that benefits from being reminded of that talk?

I'm glad for the peek inside their heads, though.</comment>


On Meteors and Megatons - <AUTHOR> http://nuclearsecrecy.com/blog/2013/02/19/on-meteors-and-megatons/

<comment><AUTHOR> See also: Meteors Against Nukes [1] from the FAS Strategic Security Blog

>> Impact sites still have to be found but one reportedly was Chebarkul Lake, some 72 kilometers (45 miles) southwest of the city of Chelyabinsk. Another piece impacted near the town of Zlatoust some 80 kilometers (49 miles) to the northwest.

Approximately 88 kilometers (55 miles) northeast of Chebarkul Lake is Chelyabinsk-65 (Mayak), a plutonium production and fissile material storage complex. Another 40 miles to the north is Chelyabinsk-70 (Snezhinsk), a nuclear warhead design and storage complex.

Right in the meteor's path, approximately 115 kilometers (72 miles) southwest of Chebarkul Lake, is Zlatoust-36, one of the two main warhead assembly and disassembly facilities in Russia. Adjacent to the facility is a national-level nuclear weapons storage site. <<

[1] [http://www.fas.org/blog/ssp/2013/02/meteors-against- nukes.ph...](http://www.fas.org/blog/ssp/2013/02/meteors-against-nukes.php)</comment>


Reducing Single Point of Failure using Service Workers - <AUTHOR> http://calendar.perfplanet.com/2015/reducing-single-point-of-failure-using-service-workers/ <comment><USER2> I've seen a lot of weird talk regarding using Service Workers to do things that don't make any sense to me.

In this case, what good is all this code? The service worker only controls the page on _subsequent_ visits, after the user already has a warm cache that includes the 3rd party script. And even if that weren't true, can your site really degrade if angular times out and fails to load?</comment>


Show HN: Babel – Transfer from Spotify and SoundCloud to Apple Music - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/babel-transfer-from-spotify-to-apple-music/id1118140541?mt=8 <comment><AUTHOR> Babel is an iOS app focused on playlist transfer and discovery for Apple Music. In light of the uncertainty surrounding SoundCloud, I added a feature that allows users to transfer their SoundCloud playlists. Any feedback is very welcome.

<comment><USER2> How does this not violate the Spotify ToS? I thought they had banned exporter apps.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure if it is explicitly prohibited, but preventing users from transferring their data would be in conflict with data portability rights so I don't think it would be enforced.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Wish this existed for my thumbs and playlists in Pandora</comment>


Arab states are embracing solar power - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2020/05/09/arab-states-are-embracing-solar-power <comment><USER2> Unfortunately a lot of that solar power will go towards air conditioning. Right now, Qatar is literally air conditioning the outside to make the heat from the sidewalks less deadly. Better than running the ACs in oil, but the amount of AC required to make these places survivable by humans is only going to grow.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/world/climate-e...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/world/climate- environment/climate-change-qatar-air-conditioning-outdoors/)

<comment><USER3> Why unfortunately? Are you suggesting that air conditioning sidewalks in Qatar is a luxury? Because the only other option I can think of is for people to leave Qatar. It's far from a luxury.

<comment><USER2> Unfortunate for climate change. The heat from those ACs has to go somewhere. And they emit greenhouse gases.

[https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/03/countries-crank- ac-e...](https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/03/countries-crank-ac-emissions- potent-greenhouse-gases-are-likely-skyrocket)

<comment><USER4> If all AC is running on solar power then would it be heating up the earth anymore than the sunlight would have on its own?

<comment><USER5> Yes, because air conditioning units have net positive heat generation. Though they usually use water as their heat sinks, and if that water is flushed then it effectively eliminates the heat in a practical sense if not a thermodynamic sense.

Reply in comment, since HN is rate limiting my VPN.

> Yes, because air conditioning units have net positive heat generation. > Though they usually use water as their heat sinks, and if that water is > flushed then it effectively eliminates the heat in a practical sense if not > a thermodynamic sense.

This is assuming that the terrain without solar panels would convert as much energy into heat as the solar panels are collecting. In reality the terrain without solar panels reflects a lot of the energy it receives, whereas solar panels are optimized to absorb as much of it as possible.

<comment><USER6> This is wrong. The net positive heat generation comes from the energy that the ACs consume. If they are entirely running on solar power this energy would have become heat anyway.

<comment><USER7> Unless that energy would otherwise be reflected back out of the atmosphere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Of all places that could benefit, those places seem high on the list.

I grew up in a state with tons of wind, but wind energy was hardly ever used (outside the old farmer windmills that were largely around because they looked cool). It was a great candidate for wind power but the local power companies were already heavy net exporters of power, coal, hydro electric. There just wasn't the incentive despite a lot of availability.

<comment><USER9> Here in Germany many people simply are against wind-power-plants. They think they're ugly, loud, and dangerous.

<comment><USER10> But don't worry guys, we're only burning coal to produce _40%_ of our power!

<comment><USER11> At least we have a plan to turn that off at some point in the future (2038) now.

Something which can't be said about storing our nuclear waste for example...

<comment><USER5> Nuclear waste is a trivial problem. The amount of waste is incredibly miniscule. The entirety of the US waste generated from nuclear power generation fits into a volume the footprint of a football field and 10 yards high.

<comment><USER11> Next year when the last nuclear reactor goes down in Germany we'd have something around 15.000 tons. Since we're not the US of A with a hell lot of space and the fact that we've been looking for a spot for years now, it's not a trivial problem at all.

But maybe you can convince your government to take our waste and fix this "trivial" problem? I'm sure we'd be able to pay for it a nice sum and your current president looks like he might be stupid enough to actually do it.

<comment><USER5> 17,000 tons of uranium is less than a 10x10x10 meter cube of uranium.

The US already has a disposal site constructed in the desert, but we're not using it yet. Europe also has a dig in Finland. Most of it stays on site because there's so little of it to store.

<comment><USER11> No, it stays on side because it's either not transportable (see Asse) or, as I said: there is no space for it.

FYI: Finland is not like an US state only because it's part of Europe. It's an independent country and they will not take foreign nuclear waste.

PS. those 17.000 tons are just the highly radioactive material. All together it will be 280.000 cubic meters when we're finished decommissioning.

<comment><USER5> What's hard about transporting it? The US manages to ship these just fine [1]. These casks can be transported via semi truck and shipping container [2]. Maybe Europe doesn't have as good waste container standardization.

1 [https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about- spent-...](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent- nuclear-fuel)

2\. [http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2015/ph241/avery-w2/images...](http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2015/ph241/avery-w2/images/f1big.jpg)

Replies in comment, since HN is limiting my work VPN or something like that.

> Is this a straw man or did you really not understand what I wrote?

From your comment:

> No, it stays on side because it's either not transportable (see Asse)

You explicitly brought up ease of transport.

> I also put something in there. This word in the brackets. You might have > googled it up where you'd come upon pictures like that: > [https://media1.faz.net/ppmedia/aktuell/1203828188/1.3595409/...](https://media1.faz.net/ppmedia/aktuell/1203828188/1.3595409/..). > Instead, you chose to ignore the complete rest of the comment and all the > comments I wrote before and only wrote a completely irrelevant answer to > something you did not understand. Congratulations for this derailment.

You claimed that transportation was a barrier to storing nuclear waste, by cherry picking one specific failure. And I refuted this claim by pointing out that plenty of the world's largest nuclear operators transport waste just fine. This isn't derailment, quite the opposite.

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository)

2\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository)

<comment><USER11> Is this a straw man or did you really not understand what I wrote?

Nobody want this shit. There is no place to transport it. None. We have to sit on it for millennia. Transport is not the issue here.

@your edit: >You explicitly brought up ease of transport.

I also put something in there. This word in the brackets. You might have googled it up where you'd come upon pictures like that: [https://media1.faz.net/ppmedia/aktuell/1203828188/1.3595409/...](https://media1.faz.net/ppmedia/aktuell/1203828188/1.3595409/mmobject- still_full/drunter-und-drueber-geht-es-in.jpg)

Instead, you chose to ignore the complete rest of the comment and all the comments I wrote before and only wrote a completely irrelevant answer to something you did not understand. Congratulations for this derailment.

EOD.

<comment><USER12> Should have countered that with links to Castor, and pictures of the mass demonstrations we have, when those are rolling. You know, like people cementing their arms or legs into rail tracks, dangling down from bridges over the tracks, and the huuuuge mass of police escorting that convoy on foot, thereby essentially making the transportation pedestrian, speedwise.

edit: but probably he wouldn't get it, because AFAIK that Yucca Mountian is unused for the same reasons as here. Local opposition...

edit: I don't know what to make to your picture of the Asse. THAT just shows our incompetence to responsible handling of the stuff. Maybe they are only full of old "Putzlappen"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Two quotes from this article I really like, first the opener:

"TWO MILLENNIA after the ancient Egyptians dropped their solar deity, Ra, their descendants are rediscovering the power of the sun."

and then the closer:

"Why spend money taking fuel out of the ground and processing it rather than relying on God-given free sun and wind?"

Very well done, kudos!

I see renewable gaining momentum here in the US as well and it's very exciting to see. In fact, I have recently just invested in BEP, and while it's not a majority share of my investment portfolio, it's quickly become one of my favorite investments.

</comment><comment><USER14> [https://www.forbes.com/sites/dominicdudley/2020/04/28/abu- dh...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/dominicdudley/2020/04/28/abu-dhabi- cheapest-solar-power/) Abu Dhabi just secured a bid for a 2GW solar plant at a record 1.35 dollar cents per KWH.

</comment><comment><USER15> To quote the poet Christopher George Latore Wallace:

"Number four, know you've heard this before,

Never get high, on your own supply."

</comment><comment><USER16> [https://outline.com/9UKJg6](https://outline.com/9UKJg6)

<comment><USER13> Thanks for that!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wonder how much usage of solar water heaters exists in these countries. It's a dead simple technology that works amazingly well in sunny areas, and saves tons of electricity when deployed at scale.

<comment><USER18> I'm not sure about the middle east but they're incredibly common in the Mediterranean (Greece, turkey, Spain etc).

<comment><USER17> Super popular in Israel, nearly everyone has them, unless it's a tall building where there's not enough roof surface area. It will pay for itself in electricity savings in a year or so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Then they can pump oil using solar energy.

<comment><USER20> That's a good way to pay for the panels.

<comment><USER21> Could be used to solve the duck curve too. Use excess solar to pump oil in the day and then use oil for power at night.

<comment><USER22> Using peeking plants mornings and at night seems like a no brainer stop gap.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> [https://archive.md/yOzVk](https://archive.md/yOzVk)

<comment><USER24> [https://archive.md/yOzVk/27be7b61acdd90c7df458546e7e91676df9...](https://archive.md/yOzVk/27be7b61acdd90c7df458546e7e91676df910193.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Sorry couldn't read it because of the pay wall, but I am interested - how do they solve the storage and transport problem? Always thought that was one of the troubles with solar for much of the region.

<comment><USER26> What storage and transport problem? This is a region that has a lot of sun, a lot of empty land near cities, and a lot of electricity usage for air conditioning. They can install a lot of solar before they need to worry about storage and transport.

<comment><USER24> Maybe the problem of transporting the energy produced there to China or the Netherlands or something? The problem with selling energy in Morocco or Egypt is that the people there are, by and large, poor, so they can't pay you very much.

<comment><USER14> Easier to generate it locally, which people in both China and the Netherlands do.

<comment><USER24> Indeed, and China has the Gobi, but the Netherlands' total solar resource is only a few terawatts, while hundreds to tens of thousands of terawatts are potentially available to be imported.

[https://www.en-tran- ce.org/custom/uploads/2019/02/Renewable-...](https://www.en-tran- ce.org/custom/uploads/2019/02/Renewable-Energy-January-2019.pdf) seems to say that last January the Netherlands had 4300 MW(p) of solar PV generating capacity, which produced 0.4 petajoules. If that's correct, the capacity factor of solar PV in the Netherlands averaged 3.5% that month, which is shockingly low, about three times lower than even Germany and nearly ten times worse than equatorial desert solar power plants — although January is one of the worst months, and eyeballing the graphs it looks like the year-round average is closer to 1.3 PJ per month, giving a deplorable 10% capacity factor similar to Germany's. Until and unless panel prices drop dramatically again, situating the panels somewhere sunnier will produce three times as much energy, enough to pay for constructing quite a bit of energy transmission infrastructure.

But what happens if panel prices do drop dramatically? Well, if this appalling 10% is a typical capacity factor for utility-scale PV in the Netherlands, the total solar resource is only 4.2 terawatts, of which about 900 gigawatts is available with typical 21%-efficient solar panels. This is an order of magnitude higher than the country's current energy demand, but of course that means that you'd have to cover about 10% of the countryside with solar panels to fulfill that demand from PV alone — and seasonal variability means you'd have to triple that if demand is constant year-round. Covering a third of the Netherlands with PV panels is probably not possible, and covering more than 100% of it is definitely not possible. So the new kinds of energy-intensive industry that will become possible if PV panels get cheaper still will be out of reach of indigenous PV production.

<comment><USER14> These back of the envelope calculations are nice. But the underlying assumption of having just one source of energy to cover all needs is wrong. In the Netherlands we have lots of untapped potential in the form of wind, tidal, geothermal and imported hydro-electrical (from Norway). There are only 2 coal plants left (a lot of them were shut down in recent years) and quite a few gas plants and 2 relatively small nuclear plants that are very old at this point (i.e. likely to be shut down at some point).

Between all of those sources, I suspect that importing solar from north Africa or China is not going to be attractive from a cost or efficiency point of view any time soon.

Offshore wind is getting a lot of investment and dropping panel prices are going to cause a lot of homeowners to put these on their roofs. Lots of people put panels on their roofs already, which in most cases does not fully cover their needs but lowers their energy cost. I wonder if that is included in the report. Reports like this tend to focus on grid providers. A lot of solar generation is happening off grid. Home owners, businesses, EV charging stations, etc. are all use cases where solar panels are commonly used to lower energy cost.

<comment><USER24> As happened last time I conversed with you, you seem to have reinterpreted my words to mean something that is obviously wrong so that you can disagree with it, and then downvoted my original comment when I had the temerity to rebut you — this despite the fact that my comment explicitly disclaimed the absurd interpretation you imposed on it.

— ⁂ —

I didn't make an underlying _assumption_ about having just one source of energy to cover all needs. I made an extensively-sourced, well-substantiated _calculation_ that, out of all the sources of energy available in the Netherlands, _two_ of them represent a large enough resource _to support an order-of-magnitude increase in energy usage_ — enhanced geothermal and solar — and neither of these will be economically competitive with importing solar energy from elsewhere.

The absurd misinterpretation that underlies your comment is that I'm talking about what will happen in, say, 2021, 2022, 2024, or 2028. But it should be obvious that the Netherlands is not on a path to use an order of magnitude more energy in 2028, nor will solar power in Morocco and the like usher in "new kinds of energy-intensive industry" that quickly. So, as should have been obvious from my initial comment, I'm talking about a longer timescale than that; I think 2040 to 2060. You chose to ignore this and instead interpret my comment as patent absurdity.

— ⁂ —

Let's talk a little bit about this "lots of untapped potential" and "a lot of investment" and "a lot of homeowners" who "put panels on their roofs" you tout in your comment.

— ⁂ —

First, what about the homeowners? Well, putting panels on your roof doesn't improve your capacity factor relative to the utility-scale plants surveyed in the reports I cited; in most cases it worsens it, because it's too expensive to reorient the roof to the optimal angle, and most people just use whatever the roof's existing angle is instead of building an extra truss to support the panel. So a square-meter 200-watt (peak) solar panel on a Dutch roof is still going to generate only about 20 watts on average, maybe 15 watts if your roof is at an unfortunate angle.

Moreover, there isn't nearly enough roof for rooftop solar to meet a significant fraction of demand. Current marketed energy consumption in the Netherlands is about 60 gigawatts electric, 100 gigawatts total, about 5.6 kilowatts per capita — about 280 square meters of panels per person.

Nevertheless, the total solar resource in the country is, as I said, 4.2 terawatts, of which 900 gigawatts would be available with current mainstream solar panels. It should be apparent that Dutch residential rooftop solar can only ever be an insignificantly tiny fraction of even the total current demand. It is an irrelevant distraction.

— ⁂ —

Of the other sources you mention, three — wind, tidal, and hydroelectric energy imported from Norway — are also insignificantly small compared to the country's solar resource. The fourth, geothermal, represents a larger energy resource than the solar resource, but because it is more expensive to access, it will remain untapped until after the Netherlands starts to experience a scarcity of places to erect solar panels.

David MacKay's Europe-wide estimate of the wind power resource per person is 0.4 W/m² [http://withouthotair.com/c30/page_232.shtml](http://withouthotair.com/c30/page_232.shtml), which works out to 17 GW in the Netherlands' 42865 km². This is enough to supply about a quarter of current marketed energy consumption. You will note that this 0.017 TW is insignificant compared to the 4.2 TW of solar resource. This is true almost everywhere, not just in the Netherlands; MacKay cites a _worldwide_ estimate [http://withouthotair.com/c30/page_235.shtml](http://withouthotair.com/c30/page_235.shtml) of some 53000 TWh/year (6 TW) of wind resource, which you will note is comparable to the solar resource of _just the Netherlands_.

Current Dutch wind farms total some 6 TW of nameplate capacity and are growing about 10% per year. These produce about 2 TW of power on average, giving about a 30%–40% capacity factor, a bit low for wind but not unreasonable. This represents 2% of the Netherlands' current energy demand, potentially growing to 4% within a decade.

[https://globalwindatlas.info/area/Netherlands](https://globalwindatlas.info/area/Netherlands) gives much higher numbers: 500 W/m² at a height of 100 m. This is lower than the solar resource only by a factor of 2, rather than the factor of 400 from MacKay. To resolve the discrepancy, let's look at [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windpark_Noordoostpolder](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windpark_Noordoostpolder), in an area the Global Wind Atlas rates as having 600 W/m² resource. It has a nameplate capacity of 429 MW and generates 1.4 TWh/year, which is 160 MW, a 37% capacity factor. It occupies 8 km², thus giving 20 W/m² on average, halfway between the two numbers. This is a bit better than what you would get with current mainstream solar panels (200 W/m² with a 10% capacity factor gives you 20 W/m² of panel, but angled at 53° you get 12 W per m² of land).

But presumably if you blanket a large percentage of the country with windmills, the wind speed will go down.

Tidal power is about two orders of magnitude smaller than wind power; MacKay [http://withouthotair.com/c30/page_237.shtml](http://withouthotair.com/c30/page_237.shtml) cites "Kowalik (2004)" as estimating a worldwide practically-extractable resource of 40–80 GW. The Netherlands, with its mere 1900 km of coastline, can't have more than 1% of that total, since it has about 0.1% of the world's total coastline of 1.6 million km.

Norwegian hydroelectric energy is almost tapped out, and certainly cannot provide an order of magnitude more energy than at present; there just isn't enough rainfall at high elevations. Moreover, it is a particularly expensive form of energy, not just in flooded upstream lands and the risk of dam breaches but also in construction. Historically it has been competitive with, even a bit cheaper than, fossil-fuel power plants; but it has not experienced the dramatic collapse in pricing that photovoltaic has over the last decade.

— ⁂ —

Historically, geothermal power has been limited to areas with subterranean water in near contact with magma near the surface. But modern hydrofracking approaches ("enhanced geothermal systems", also more straightforwardly called "hot dry rock") have demonstrated the ability to extract thermal energy from much deeper rock without the necessity for it to already be wet; almost anywhere in the world can do this, using drilling equipment similar to an oil well. An enormous amount of fossil energy is locked in the crust from the last several billion years of radioactive decay. For uses like electricity and transport, though, the trouble is that turning the heat into a useful form requires running that heat through the same kind of steam turbines that are failing to compete with PV in existing coal and oil plants. The resource is enormous, orders of magnitude larger than solar, but even if drilling were free, solar will be cheaper until we start running out of land. Unless heat engines suddenly get a lot cheaper.

The geothermal gradient is typically about 30°/km, so typically you need to drill 3 km to even reach boiling, and almost 12 km to reach water's critical point. Most of the heat is "fossil heat"; heat flow out of the earth is currently about 44 TW, but this has been going on for 4 billion years, and most of that heat is still there, several million yottajoules.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The countries mentioned here are among the countries with the largest solar resources in the world.

— ⁂ —

It's important to understand the magnitudes we're talking about: world marketed energy consumption, excluding food but including non-electric energy uses like shipping, is² about 19 terawatts (160 terawatt hours per year or 14000 Mtoe per year); total terrestrial insolation is roughly 130 000 terawatts (at 1000 W/m², at ground level) to 170 000 terawatts (at 1361 W/m², above the atmosphere); and the Ghawar supergiant oil field contained a bit over 100 billion barrels of oil before the humans started extracting it³. At the standard value of 37 MJ/ℓ, 100 billion barrels is almost 600 exajoules⁴ ⁵; if you burned it all in one year it would also produce 19 terawatts. Total world oil "production" is about 81 million barrels a day⁶, which works out to 5.5 terawatts, more than a quarter of world marketed energy consumption (although a significant minority of that oil is made into asphalt and plastics rather than burned).

So current world marketed energy consumption is a bit over 0.1% of total terrestrial insolation, and oil is only able to supply a small part (≈20%) of world marketed energy consumption. The solar resource, like the enhanced geothermal resource and the fusion-fuel resource of the oceans, is truly immense, dwarfing fossil fuel consumption.

Morocco, to take one of the listed countries as an example, is 710 000 km² of mostly cloudless desert¹. If solar plants there get a 30% capacity factor (typical for temperate deserts, maybe a bit low for Morocco) and use low-cost 16%-efficient solar panels, they'll produce 48 W/m² (on average around the clock), which is 48 MW/km²; the country as a whole could produce 34 terawatts, about double world marketed energy consumption.

— ⁂ —

Historically speaking, the humans have burned fossil fuels because their photovoltaic panel manufacturing was too inefficient; until the 1990s, it took more energy to produce a solar panel than it would produce during its design lifetime of 30 years. Now low-cost solar modules cost €0.18 per (peak) watt⁷, following a dramatic fall in crystalline silicon PV module prices from €2.17 per peak watt in May 2009⁰ to €0.19 in December 2018, representing dramatic improvements in efficiency of some 22% per year; since then, a price-fixing cartel then announced at Davos has prevented further improvements in efficiency from further lowering wholesale prices. Still, their cost is now comparable to the cost of the heat engines and electric generators needed to harness fossil fuels for purposes other than raw heat, exclusive of fuel and other operational expenses.

It's commonly commented that the sun doesn't shine at night, so solar power only works at night if you have transcontinental power transmission lines (not yet existing, probably HVDC, perhaps a strategic vulnerability similar to Twitter) or utility-scale energy storage. The need for storage can make solar energy roughly as expensive at night as fossil-fuel energy, but during the day it's considerably cheaper in areas with large solar resources. If transcontinental HVDC becomes a real thing, the countries mentioned could become bigger exporters of solar energy than they ever were of oil energy.

— ⁂ —

One more note about Morocco: Morocco has a lot of Arabs, but it also has a lot of Berbers¹; it seems sort of flamebaity to describe it as an "Arab state"!

—

⁰ [https://web.archive.org/web/20100722072720/http://www.solars...](https://web.archive.org/web/20100722072720/http://www.solarserver.com/service/pvx- spot-market-price-index-solar-pv-modules.html)

¹ [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morocco](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morocco)

² [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption)

³ [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghawar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghawar)

⁴ [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrel_%28unit%29#Oil_barrel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrel_%28unit%29#Oil_barrel)

⁵ [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density)

⁶ [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_produ...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_production)

⁷ [https://www.solarserver.de/pv-modulpreise/](https://www.solarserver.de/pv- modulpreise/)

<comment><USER27> Could you give more details about the price fixing cartel?

Who is in it?

What is the effect of this cartel likely to be on prices /progress?

Will it be elaffected by eu/us regulation ?

<comment><USER24> At least GCL System Integration Technology Co., apparently, and presumably most or all of the Chinese PV manufacturing industry, which is most of the world's:

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-davos-meeting-solar- gcl-i...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-davos-meeting-solar-gcl- idUSKCN1PI2OQ)

HN discussion at the time:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19002696](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19002696)

Like the DRAM cartel in the mid-1990s, it will probably hold prices constant for a while (the price freeze has lasted a year and a half already) before they start falling again. In the DRAM case they fell to the previous trend line, but in this case they might not; reducing panel costs much further would make them cheaper per square meter than things like window glass. Crystalline silicon photovoltaic panels have a minimum raw-materials cost per watt governed by terrestrial insolation and the mechanical fragility of silicon; this is different from the situation with DRAM where bits in RAM can be made arbitrarily small.

The US is currently imposing punitive tariffs on solar panel imports because the zombie bankrupt US solar panel manufacturer Suniva filed a lawsuit saying prices were too low — and won! So, whatever is going to happen with solar energy, the US will not be a participant for a few years, and maybe not ever. The EU certainly could make important moves, if they were to fund a venture to spin up PV production at prices that undercut China's, and certainly they are big PV buyers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> _Its 6m panels produce 1.5 gigawatts (GW) of energy_

This is one thing I don't get: why do journalists confuse units so often?

<comment><USER24> This is a case where journalists are, for once, not confusing units. A square meter of solar panels produces about 200 watts peak, 50 watts round-the-clock average†. A gigawatt is a billion watts, so that's about 5 million square meters or 20 million square meters of solar panels, depending on whether they're talking about peak or average power.

A journalist confusing units might have said something like "Its 6 million panels produce 3600 gigawatt hours," without bothering to tell you whether that's per day, per month, or per year. But it's perfectly correct to say that a panel or a solar plant produces some number of gigawatts.

† Yes, this depends on the type of panel and the location. Some panels are a little higher efficiency, some are a little lower efficiency, and the ones we use on satellites are a lot higher efficiency. And different places have more or less sun. Typical numbers are 1000 W/m² of "solar constant" nominal maximum insolation, 16%–21% efficiency (ratio of insolation to energy produced), and 15%–30% capacity factor (ratio of average power to peak power).

<comment><USER29> The problem here is that the unit and the thing being measured don't agree in that sentence. As a reader, I have to guess if the author really meant:

> _Its 6m panels produce 1.5 gigawatt_ [-hour] _s (GW_ [h] _) of energy_ [per > year]

or

> _Its 6m panels produce 1.5 gigawatts (GW) of_ [power]

With some reasoning, I can land on the 2nd one just fine, but a little doubt lingers, because I've seen similar errors where I had to do the first substitution to make the numbers work.

<comment><USER24> I agree that some authors do make the first error you suggest, but the unit and the thing being measured definitely do agree; the first interpretation is just incorrect.

<comment><USER29> The use of "energy" when the author meant "power" is the point of confusion here. That's the unit/thing disagreement I'm referring to.

<comment><USER24> Oh, hmm, I don't think it's actually wrong. I mean, it's valid to say that the cost of this bag of sand is US$1, or that the cost of the bag of sand is US$0.05 per kg. It's valid to say that I went 100 km of distance, or that I went 100 km per hour, of distance. It's valid to say that I poured 15 kg of flour into the bowl, or that I poured 1 kg per second of flour into the bowl. It's valid to say that I have 120 mph of groundspeed, or that I am accelerating at 1 mph/sec of groundspeed. It's valid to say that I'm at 22 meters of altitude, or that I am gaining 0.1 meters per second of altitude. Would you reject some or all of these as ill-formed?

A watt is just a joule per second, and a joule is a measure of energy, so I think that, in the same way, it's reasonable to talk about both "3100 joules of energy" and "200 watts of energy". I think it would probably be better to say "200 watts of power", but the other one isn't _wrong_. Is it?

Nearly every quantitative statement has an implicit denominator somewhere. Your server serves 50,000 requests per second, you say? Is that per core or per machine? Or maybe per rack? Occasionally there are implicit numerators as well: maybe those are 50,000 _one-kilobyte_ requests.

<comment><USER30> > the other one isn't wrong. Is it?

Yes, it is. To use one of your examples, it's as wrong as saying you travelled a distance of 120 mph.

<comment><USER24> "An energy of 1.5 gigawatts" would clearly be incorrect, like "a distance of 120 mph", but "120 miles per hour of distance" sounds fine to my ear; does it not to yours? And what the article said was "1.5 gigawatts of energy".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> A lot of solar panels were insalled where I live compared to none five years ago. However their only use case here is to pump water out of the ground. The prices of the panel don't make them good investment for home usage. And even the government don't provide enough incentives to invest in them.

<comment><USER32> Do you have numbers?

<comment><USER31> Well, we have only one company installing solar panels in a ~25 km radius. And they're installing around 3 installation per month, each have 8 large panels.I don't have the exact number of how many watt they generate. But they are capable of powering pumps that pulls 12 liters per second.

<comment><USER24> You're probably mistaken [edit: no, I was wrong] about whether they're good investments for home usage and whether government subsidies would be needed, but maybe you live in a country where import tariffs make the panels cost a lot more than they cost on the open market.

By "large" do you mean something more like 0.01 m², 0.1 m², 1 m², 10 m², or 100 m²? Any of those is a "large panel" in some frame of reference.

<comment><USER31> They're not a good investment due to high cost of the panels compared to the price of electricity. Which to be fair is heavily subsided be the state. I'm looking forward to install ones myself, but I'm in the 90th percentile of people in my country that can afford to write big check upfront for power for home usage. Again most of the usage now is limited to agriculture since it makes sense there financially.

By large I mean around 2m² each. Not sure the best size to capture the most out of the sun. But we're at the edge of the Sahara desert, so the climate is a little bit helping there.

<comment><USER24> Interesting! Yeah, if electricity is heavily subsidized, you're probably right that solar panels are unprofitable. How much does electricity cost? Why don't the agricultural water pumping folks use the subsidized electricity instead of installing solar panels?

<comment><USER31> 0.021 usd per kwh. Farmer are sparsely located, so linking them to the main grid is costly as they need to pay for it by themselves.

<comment><USER24> Hmm, if we use €0.19/Wp as the price, US$1.08/€ as the exchange rate, and 30% as the capacity factor (I'm assuming it's a bit sunnier than Arizona, which has a 25% average capacity factor for utility-scale solar), the payback time is only 3.7 years. That seems like a pretty profitable investment even despite the subsidized electrical rate.

To be concrete, a 200-watt solar panel should cost about US$41, and produce on average 60 watts: 0.06 kWh/h, which is US$0.00126 per hour, US$0.03 per day, US$0.92 per month, US$11 per year. So in a bit less than four years, it pays for itself, unless the subsidized price of power drops by then or someone steals the panel. If we include a motor scooter battery and cigarette-lighter inverter so you can plug regular appliances into it, even at night, the payback time jumps up to maybe ten years.

Maybe you're mostly saying that US$41 or US$100 is a lot of money to invest up front, or maybe the problem is (as it is here in Argentina) that panel prices are wildly inflated by corruption.

<comment><USER33> Last time I was installing panels, they were cheap even the mono ones, but there were other costs like mppt charger, batteries, inverter and DC wires (copper is expensive) when I summed it all, I got to the breakeven point in 10 years.

Now I am thinking about grid connected setup but still AC module isn't cheap if they were only $50-$100, like the enphase AC units embedded into solar panel itself, it would be worth it. But it nearly doubles the price so I've not installed any panel yet.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Quiz HN: Test your biases - <AUTHOR>

You are the minister of health.  Currently, you screen all citizens for cow-flu using test X.  You want to add another test, though, and you have two options: test Y or test Z.  Test Y is strongly correlated with test X.  Test Z is not correlated with test X.<p>Do you add test Y or test Z? <comment><USER2> Please provide more information. What is the specificity of each test? What is the sensitivity of each test? And how virulent is the disease? And how expensive is each test?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitivity_and_specificity>

<http://www.nhhealthcost.org/costByProcedure.aspx>

<comment><AUTHOR> That's pretty much the right answer.

Let's say all tests cost the same and are 99% specific. Test X is at least 70% sensitive. Test Y and Z have unknown sensitivity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> All good tests should be strongly correlated with the presence/absence of swine flue, and hence correlated with each other. So either tests X/Y are broken, or test Z is broken. Or both.

We need to figure out which before answering the question.

<comment><AUTHOR> Let's say X and Y are both good tests. Is it still possible you would prefer Z to Y?

<comment><USER4> If Z caught most of the cases that X missed, but not many that X caught then it would be very useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My first instinct is to add test Z. Since Y correlates well with X, Z would provide more information.

But if Y is correlated to X, that might indicate something about its sensitivity.

</comment><comment><USER6> If there are tests for a binary result (has cow-flu/does not have cow-flu) that are not correlated, one or both of the tests is bad. Further information could confirm or negate the choice of Y or Z (or sticking only with X).</comment>


Javascript hack weekend: Unique projects to inspire awesome hacks - <AUTHOR> http://blog.nowjs.com/weekends-are-for-hacking-heres-some-un-cruddy <comment><USER2> This is a project I wrote the weekend of the Japan earthquake. <http://tensecondstotokyo.com/>

I wanted to see what was happening in Japan live from the people who live there.

I used node and socket.io to provide a realtime view of photos posted to Twitpic on Twitter. The server stores the last 100 photos found, so that's the max that are ever seen. Just a stream of photos.

Other than a few friends at work and some folks at a node.js talk I gave a few weeks ago, no one else has seen this. Well, I did show it to Mikey from Instagram when I ran into him at a coffee shop.

I'm also working on integrating Instagram's photos too, but haven't finished that yet.

Couple of notes:

1) There's never been more than a handful of people accessing the site at a time, so I have no idea how well it will scale. There's almost no load, so I suspect it shouldn't be too much of a problem.

2) My url parsing regex fu needs some work. If you watch the stream with dev tools enabled, you'll see a number of 404s from Twitpic where non-existent photos are being accessed. Don't worry, these don't show up visually on the site though.

Would love people's feedback, suggestions, and complaints. Especially from design-type folks. I'd like to give it a better look.

Conact info: @geuis or email@example.com

<comment><USER3> Is this for the whole of Japan or Tokyo only?

<comment><USER2> Whole of the country. Its geo centered on the Imperial palace in Tokyo though, but the range includes all of the country.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't know if this counts as a hack (certainly it took a lot longer than a weekend) but here's my web-based timeline software done mainly in JS: <http://www.tiki-toki.com>

</comment><comment><USER5> If you don't need the real time element that NodeJS/NowJS offers, may I suggest you give <http://www.akshell.com> a go. Real time features are in the works, but aren't currently publicly available.

We're really keen to see people experiment with server side JavaScript on the platform and will instantly answer any queries you may have on our mailing list at <http://groups.google.com/group/akshell>

<comment><USER6> What do you mean by "if you don't need the real-time element"?

<comment><USER5> I mean that if you're building a typical web app that uses the request/response cycle rather than requiring real time push from the server using Comet or WebSockets, Akshell, with it's synchronous I/O, should be easier to work with.

<comment><USER6> Oh, I see. So it works as normal it just doesn't have server push yet. Gotcha.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Made a project last weekend using the raphael.js + the Facebook API.

<http://shalecraig.com/friendspore>

Since it's all local (no node + etc), your data stays with you.

</comment><comment><USER8> Similar to Popcorn.js but more for visual effects:

<http://www.cacophonyjs.com/>

(self plug :)</comment>


Dominos Aus: Native app to shimmed website gets thr thumbs down - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/dominos/id336882722?mt=8

<comment><USER2> It's a similar story on Android, too. (though Google Play doesn't break out current version vs all versions)

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=au.com.dominos...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=au.com.dominos.olo.android.app)

Having used the app prior to the change and after the change, I don't think it's just the switch away from native that is causing the negative reviews. It's that the website is essentially unusable without zooming in/out. I suspect that if they had switched from native to at least a site that had fit a webview nicely, the response may not have been negative at all.</comment>


Abandon fish! Leaving GlassFish for TomEE or JBoss - <AUTHOR> http://zeroturnaround.com/rebellabs/abandon-fish-migrating-from-glassfish-to-jboss-or-tomee/ <comment><USER2> I am a little surprised to see an article like this on HN. I wouldn't have thought the kind of person who reads HN uses anything as fusty as a Java EE application server.

Am i mistaken? How many of us are using Java EE? Is it just those of us who are toiling away in the code mines of megacorps? Or are some of us using Java EE in cool and exciting startups?

<comment><USER3> I used it extensively, I wrote a suite of web based tools for an MMO with GF 3.12, at the time I started writing I had good familiarity with Java, but none-with J2EE technologies, REST, JSON etc. Whilst I implemented what I set out to do, when the time came to implement a significant ammount of new features, one thing that amazed me was the labyrinth of code that I'd had to create (beans, resources, factories, abstract base classes) - and how quickly it was becoming a major chore to change the trivialest of things. Also I made the unfortunate mistake of using JavaDB/Derby as the datastore, thinking I had no need for a full RDBMS, I'll never make that mistake again, it's the most pathetic excuse for a db ever (I've used Oracle, MSSQL, Sybase, MySQL and Sqlite in the past, so I have some perspective on the matter)

So I began looking for alternatives, as a result v2 is written in Python (Flask/REST producing JSON, a simple wrapper around TornDB querying a MySQL db) which is consumed and presented by the Javascript/HTML front end using AngularJS. I re-implemented everything V1 had from scratch in under three days and was ready to begin adding the new features. By comparison the initial implementation in Java had taken me several weeks. Obviously some of that is to be expected, its easier to re-write than write. But I come away now feeling that Java & Glassfish made me jump through hoops to accomplish something that should have been simple, and I was certainly guilty of chosing the wrong tool for the job, but Java was what I knew best at the time.

<comment><USER4> > how quickly it was becoming a major chore to change the trivialest of things

This was more than likely just bad design on your part. GlassFish 3.12 support Java EE 6 which supports a lot of POJO based development - between your mention of abstract base classes, factories, and J2EE (which became Java EE over 8 years ago) I have to wonder if you used a lot of legacy APIs and design patterns.

> Also I made the unfortunate mistake of using JavaDB/Derby as the datastore

Derby is neat for an portable in-process relation db but no one in their right mind uses it for a large or high-performance db. But most db changes should be isolated to your persistence layer using Hibernate/JPA so changing database vendors shouldn't have caused a big change in your code unless you had to redesign your tables for some other reason.

<comment><USER3> > This was more than likely just bad design on your part.

Oh I won't deny that, as I mentioned, I approached the problem from a background with limited exposure to modern web technologies. Still though, lets take just one aspect, db interaction for which I used hibernate:

First I create my DB structure, then create an XML mapping, then create the POJO model (replete with getters/setters) sure, most IDEs do this automagically, but experience with switching IDEs and changing versions makes me abhore IDE generated code, then hibernate's own XML config, then the utility class (I called these factories, my bad). Not to mention the prerequisites that made all this possible, glassfish, maven etc require their own configuration etc. By now I have several thousand lines of code and I've not even implemented any functionality. Time taken, no clue, but hours, lots of hours.

The equivalent with Python + TornDb?

Create schema, extend torndb to pull credentials from environment variables & connect to db (3 lines of code, wow), create flaskapp.py, bind path to a method, begin writing the "real" code. Lines of source, under 100. Time taken, less than an hour.

> J2EE (which became Java EE over 8 years ago) I have to wonder if you used a > lot of legacy APIs and design patterns.

When you spend a considerable amount of time calling something by one name, despite a rename you tend to continue. Apologies for using the incorrect name, but the rest of your assumption are unfounded unless you're calling Glassfish, Hibernate, Jersey, JSF and JavaDb legacy ..

> Derby is neat for an portable in-process relation db but no one in their > right mind uses it for a large or high-performance db

Those were precisely the reasons I chose it, the example I gave isn't large or high performance, and its pathetic at that role, I stand by my assertion. You'd be better off using serialised objects, CSV files, heck even notes scribbed on postit notes tacked to the wall than JavaDB.

I say this after countless hours spent taking the platform offline to rebuild the database which grew uncontrollably despite careful use of transactions within hibernate and daily cron jobs to run SYSCS_UTIL.SYSCS_COMPRESS_TABLE

<comment><USER2> For the schema stuff, these days what i would do is write the objects, add the minimal set of JPA annotations (which can be as little as @Entity at the top and @Id on the ID column), then generate the DDL from that. You don't need any XML for the mapping.

Sadly, you do still need a persistence.xml with the database connection details, and for some providers a list of all your entity classes (WTF). I have a build script which generates all that (amongst other things), though:

[https://bitbucket.org/twic/jpaquickstart/src/0c5b383026ba097...](https://bitbucket.org/twic/jpaquickstart/src/0c5b383026ba097f86e29866b6ccd90e9663f2fd/build.gradle?at=default)

<comment><USER3> Interesting!

I did end up using annotations as you mention. However I chose to manage the db structure myself because early on I encountered problems when I changed data types and indexes, hibernate incombination with JavaDB dropped then recreated the structure, which is fine, but then if you want to push your changes to the live version, I had to write the SQL to port the live data into the newly created table which was a PITA given javadb can't insert into "GENERATED ALWAYS AS IDENTITY" columns, so that in turn meant more SQL to preserve referential relationship between data. I was always left feeling I did something totally wrong in that respect, so I blame myself.

A part of this also stems from the way I approach building an application, I'll always spec & then create out the DB as a way of helping me visualise the model before I start doing any "real" coding.

I still respect Java enormously, but I'm not at all sold on JEE application servers for anything below enterprise scale applications. And for any case where you need a quick prototype, Java definitely will not be my choice in the future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> see also Resin, which has a GPL version [http://www.caucho.com/](http://www.caucho.com/)</comment>


Peter Thiel, Trump Adviser, Has a Backup Country: New Zealand - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/25/technology/peter-thiel-new-zealand-citizenship.html <comment><USER2> The main news in the article is that Peter Thiel has had New Zealand citizenship since 2011; this was only recently revealed. Questions are being raised in NZ about how it was possible for him to obtain citizenship without (apparently) spending significant time in the country.</comment>


The Growing Emptiness of the "Star Wars" Universe - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-growing-emptiness-of-the-star-wars-universe <comment><AUTHOR> I shared this mostly because of the Gibson quote enclosed, and if you don't want to read the article, here's the quote, which involves a coolhunter who can viscerally sense cool and uncool evaluating Tommy Hillfinger:

"This stuff is simulacra of simulacra of simulacra. A diluted tincture of Ralph Lauren, who had himself diluted the glory days of Brooks Brothers, who themselves had stepped on the product of Jermyn Street and Savile Row . . . . But Tommy surely is the null point, the black hole. There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul."

<comment><USER2> There's a picture from Radiohead's original OK Computer website which this reminds me of.

"DENY OXYGEN

There is nothing I can say which will come as any sort of surprise to anyone. There is no work I can produce which hasn't been done before. There is no music I can listen to which doesn't remind me of something else. There is nothing I can do that isn't documented in weekly magazines. My life is essentially a last-minute rush to reorder trivial, pointless, or stolen ideas into a primitive semblance of originality. Most of my time is spent crying in darkened rooms trying to remember who I was."

The Gibson quote also reminds me of Synecdoche, New York, a stunningly beautiful film I probably can't fully recommend because it's so brutally depressing.

<comment><USER3> I think that partly this is simply an effect of accumulating experience as you get older.

For example, these days it feels like I don't find as much good novel music as I did before. But of course if I haven't heard _any_ music at all, everything will be novel, and so looking where I have already looked plenty before will not turn up as much novelty.

I mean, I can still find plenty of novel thing if I look outside of the top lists of the UK and the US, or look longer back in time, so its not simply that my tastes have narrowed but rather I just have a better overall knowledge, and what I would have found novel before I now recognise as inspired from something else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > _"Solo" discovers that the young Han is pretty much identical to the older > one, with the same skills, mannerisms, and values. It would've been > interesting to learn that Han was once a sensitive boy with a musical gift_

A wacky, subversive twist like that would go a long way in getting me interested in Disney's direction, but I just don't associate them with anything particularly risky. Which is ironic because I thought the casting of Adam Driver was brilliant — it's almost possible to imagine him single handedly saving the prequels if he were retroactively cast as Anakin.

He's good enough that I'll go watch Episode IX, but the ending of "Last Jedi" left me incredibly underwhelmed. What storylines and character arcs are even worth wrapping up? I guess I'm mildly interested in how they'll even attempt to make Rose and/or Finn relevant.

<comment> le-mark In my opinion, the decades of novels in between star wars movies where much better than the prequels and sequels we eventually got. At varying times, different novels were canon then not canon. But in the end, Lucasfilm jettisoned the lot. Maybe there were IP issues involved I don't know but the Timothy Zahn novels were epic.

Unfortunately, Lucasfilm didn't embrace them and mine them the way Feige is mining decades of Marvel comics for the MCU.

<comment><USER5> > But in the end, Lucasfilm jettisoned the lot. Maybe there were IP issues > involved I don't know but the Timothy Zahn novels were epic.

In fairness, Disney seems to have recognized that in re-canonizing characters like Thrawn.

<comment><USER6> The expanded universe had a _lot_ of absolute junk in it. It's easier for them to throw it all out and then selectively re-introduce the few bits that are worth saving than it would have been to drum out the bad bits one at a time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> That Emptiness has been apparent event since the 2nd film, and is simply continued by Disney. Disney is milking a dead cow, to the delight of the Star Wars fans who have been sucked into this drivel for nearly 40 years. It's a fucking space cowboy western with Buck Rogers quality sets, acting, and direction. Beyond the metaphors lost from the original film, Star Wars has been decades of childish marketing and quality story line missed opportunity disappointments.

<comment><USER8> It's not just milking, it seems they have actual contempt for the existing fan base to the franchise and trying to dismantle the foundation piece by piece in the worst way possible while simultaneously trying to build their own thing on top.

I'm not a Star Wars fan (Episode 1 killed it for me), but watching this from the sideline has been nothing short of bizarre to me.

<comment><USER9> The existing fan base isn't the 6-10 years old toy-demanding target audience. In 15 years, those people will be spending their money trying to participate in the nostalgia being engineered today and the existing fan base will be largely irrelevant.

<comment><USER10> But then why are they making origin stories that would only interest existing fans?

<comment><USER11> Contemporary nerd culture. It's all about being in on things, so you have 20 year olds that act like old fans of ST:TOS when they were -30 years old when it first aired, and was the last of the series that they ever watched (they may not have even watched it). They know everything about it, titles, air dates, actors who played bit parts and became famous later. Or people who didn't give a shit about Spiderman in the 90s who're fully read up on his wikia content now.

This leads to a faux or ironic nostalgia act by everyone involved: the "fans", the actual fans, the creators, and the media around it all.

It's making things pretty dull because this spans all ages. Older folks may have actually been fans from the start, but they still fall for teh nostalgia trip of the new media and spend money on it. And the media companies make things that are designed to appeal. To nod and wink at you for being so clever, for knowing which episode or comic issue that quote came from. For knowing that this guy was a villian in the comics, but here we'll give him to you as a bit part. Wink wink.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The irony of a New Yorker article on the blandness of an institution lacking the punch of its early life is sadly obvious to long time New Yorker readers.

</comment><comment><USER13> When I watched the first of the new Star Wars movies, I felt pretty much the same. It was not bad as such, but it felt so derivative. More so, I felt that it was not derivative for a lack of imagination, but because the creators were playing it safe, deliberately avoiding any deviation from a proven recipe.

And given that Walt Disney now owns the franchise, I have no expectation that any future movies set in the Star Wars universe will be any different. Which is a little sad, because the Star Wars universe is such a great backdrop to tell all kinds of interesting stories.

<comment><USER14> It would be cool if movies could be forked :)

<comment><USER15> Perhaps one could do for Star Wars what The Orville has done for Star Trek.

<comment><USER16> Thats essentially what the Mass Effect franchise is. Bioware got sick of being constrained by the Star Wars IP, costs, and continuity and simply created their own "Star Wars" which is actually much better than Star Wars IMO, or it used to be anyway.

<comment><USER17> Likewise, Babylon 5 was originally a Star Trek reboot. One of the writers couldn't get his idea to take hold, so he went independent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> A bit click baity. Solo delivered what was promised. But really, I think his big issue is really the big issue with Hollywood. But he doesn't really address that. Most _new_ takes on regular tropes are being written for TV. Our trope vocabulary is bigger now than years ago. (Maybe seeing Upgrade on Sunday, will deliver. We'll see.) And really, we are in an era that has an embarrassment of riches. Which is probably why I've become more picky with my media intake.

</comment><comment><USER19> I didn't hate Solo, but it's really disappointing that Disney is throwing away a whole bunch of ridiculously good IP.

One example is the Knights of the Eternal Empire trailer ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkgzXpKbVGE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkgzXpKbVGE)). I want to see that story. I felt more in this 5 minute trailer than I felt all throughout The Last Jedi. That can be said for pretty much all of the trailers from The Old republic.

<comment><USER10> I've like all the trailers for SWTOR (and enjoyed playing the game), but trailers are different from movies, they are telling a short story without any details, which, expanded on a full-length movie, would be on the same level as the Disney movies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Eli Schiff wrote a good review of TLJ a while back that similarly describes the dead emptiness/meaninglessness of Star Wars nowadays:

>The sequels, and in particular, Rian Johnson's latest episode, have now fully deconstructed the Star Wars universe, and shown the characters and their motivations to be vacuous. The only character remaining who really grasped the depravity of the situation is Kylo Ren. Now that there is no hope for heroes (even the Resistance doesn't believe in those anymore—after all, heroism reinforces a hierarchy that must die), we await the climactic explosion of an end to this universe that it deserves.

>More likely though, given that we're dealing with Disney, we probably won't get anything of the sort. And for that reason I now realize why fans of all stripes didn't like The Last Jedi. What they saw in the mirror was so horrifically disfigured and alienating that it couldn't be confronted. For though history is far from over, with everyone either too smart to continue living, or too stupid to die, it may be there's no one left with the will to make history anew.

[http://www.elischiff.com/blog/2017/12/27/star-wars-death- dri...](http://www.elischiff.com/blog/2017/12/27/star-wars-death-drive)

</comment><comment><USER21> I find it weird that they only present an old person's view. I understand the demographic of the newyorker, but this review may only make sense if you saw the movies in the order they came out in. But there's a huge number of both kids and adults for whom this is their first (or close to) star wars experience. I can't unsee the previous movies to get it that way, but many people haven't seen Chewie and Han yet, they don't know about the card game, they don't know why Han shooting first is significant in any way, and who will think it's obvious why Han is bragging about the distance not speed. Let's not forget to try to understand what will they see, while we complain about some issue with prequels.

</comment><comment><USER22> Reminding me that a cornerstone of my childhood was a series of cinematic figurine advertisements cribbed from one of Kurosawa's weaker pictures doesn't heal the wounds any faster.

<comment><USER22> ...but also, "Thx 1138" is basically perfect cinema and my life was better for it. Thank you, Mr. Lucas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> For a contrarian view...

I love all of the new Star Wars movies. And most of the new books. All of the new comics. Rebels was fantastic. I will buy and consume every bit of it, and I will genuinely enjoy it.

<comment><USER24> I enjoy them too. I remember when the prequels were announced sometime around 1998 or 1999. I literally cheered on my couch. Some are better than others of course, but they are still very entertaining.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I've enjoyed the stand alone movies quite a bit more.

The new trilogy suffers from having so many protagonists that none of them seem worth caring about. It seems they have HBO-envy and wanted to ape the structure of a long form multi-POV serial and jam it into a 2 hour movie and it just doesn't work.

<comment><USER26> I'd argue it's more Marvel-envy (movies, not epic TV shows), and since Disney owns both, it's more of a "hey this worked, let's try it with another franchise". I'm no expert, but I feel the Marvel universe is better at it than Star Wars.

<comment><USER10> > the Marvel universe is better at it than Star Wars

I think that's coming from an existing story structure (Comics) which work very well for multiple PoV serials and big cross-over finales. In addition to that, with the comics, there are a lot of storylines that can be used as inspiration

</comment></comment></comment><comment> xkcd-sucks Star Wars has always been an aesthetic more than anything else

<comment><USER27> I feel the same way about the Matrix. Even the first film sacrifices a lot in order to be more cinematic.

I like both aesthetics, admittedly.

<comment><USER28> Sacrifices what- the parallel computation reason for the Matrix in favor for the simple "humans as batteries" explanation to simplify it to audiences?

I never had a huge problem with that, but that's the one complaint I see thrown around a lot with the first movie.

<comment><USER27> That _is_ a complaint I have with the first movie, but my main beefs are with movies 2 and 3 making almost no sense whilst having bigger and more expensive set pieces. The first movie's main crime is that it promised so much but never really explored any of the themes, characters or locations that they established.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I only saw star wars as an adult and even the original ones seemed overhyped and unimpressive. Bad acting, bad storyline. It's a "meh" series. I haven't even bothered to see the new Disney ones.

<comment><USER30> I don't know what makes the storyline "bad", necessarily, but I _really_ don't understand the acting charge, especially against the original 1977 release.

Alec Guinness, James Earl Jones, Peter Cushing, Harrison Ford--none of these are slackers. Anthony Daniels might not have much range, but he fit perfectly in the scope required of him. Mark Hamill was convincing as Luke.

The only weak link to me, bless her soul, might have been Carrie Fisher. And maybe a few bit-players. But the bulk of the show was carried by capable, if not excellent, actors.

<comment><USER29> This is just my opinion. All of those actors are great! They were just not very good in star wars

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> SW always felt empty to me. Where star trek always dealt with deep philosophical questions of humanism, consciousness, sentience, and took scientific plausibility seriously SW dealt with very shallow concepts and eschewed scientific realism in favor of hyper space or whatever. Just not nearly as interesting.

<comment><USER5> > took scientific plausibility seriously

Didn't Star Trek essentially pioneer the concept of technobabble?

> eschewed scientific realism in favor of hyper space or whatever

Warp travel? Subspace? Q? Accelerated human evolution into lizard people?

<comment><USER32> > Warp travel? Subspace? Q? Accelerated human evolution into lizard people?

There's a lot of bad Trek out there. But also a lot of good Trek. The best of it is like a slice of speculative fiction - like a mini District 9, Interstellar, Her, or Arrival. The worst of it is pure melodrama with technobabble layered on top.

I think what the parent is getting at is that Star Wars never, ever goes the speculative fiction route. It's all "character drama in space".

<comment><USER33> Fair to say that Star Wars is more psychological than philosophical?

<comment><USER17> To me, it's more political than mechanical.

Star Wars has more political and interpersonal conflicts lead to shifts of power. Palpatine gained control of the Galactic Senate through political maneuvering - letting the Trade Federation apply political pressure through shipping fees, and then manipulating weak-minded senators while their stronger-minded companions are fleeing the Trade Federation. Rarely are technical details relevant to the plot - starship fuel or reactor operation details are vague at best, an executive summary. They don't goto Watto for engine parts, but a whole new engine, and Jedi aren't trained on starship repairs as they have astromech droids.

Star Trek has more situations where mechanical failure or damage leads to interpersonal conflicts and shifts of power. During the Klingon Civil War, you get a pretty good idea of how Geordi keeps the Romulans away. Ship fuel was a main plotline through the entire Voyager series. Everyone on every Starfleet ship has taken a college class on how the warp core reactor works, and they flaunt that knowledge regularly.

<comment><USER10> > To me, it's more political than mechanical.

That's mostly the 1-3 trilogy. The original trilogy is mostly fantasy in space/space opera</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The best advice you'll ever get about building a startup - <AUTHOR> http://seattle20.sampasite.com/blog/The-best-advice-you-ll-ever-get.htm <comment><USER2> Better than I expected considering the title. It's negative advice, though: it doesn't tell you what to do, just what not to do.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have done two startups, one successful and one misreable failure.

So Go ahead and ask :-)

<comment><USER4> How do you pick an idea (from the many) to follow?

How do you pick your team and hire?

(I've asked many people, always good to get another opinion)

<comment><USER3> >How do you pick an idea (from the many) to follow?

Well to be totally honest, I just pick the one that I would most like to do that is still doable... The important thing is to stick to it once you've decided.

>How do you pick your team and hire?

I try to find people that I know, or people that I have heard of in some way. That way I know a little bit about their track record. It is really really hard though, and if I knew the perfect answer I would be writing best-sellimg management books :-)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Does your GitHub page now have a bio link? - <AUTHOR> You can now add a small bio to your profile, directly under your username and profile photo.<p>This seems to be an unannounced new feature. Wondering if everyone got it and I'm just early on bringing it up? <comment><USER2> Yes, it's been popping up.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting. They usually announce every new little feature. Perhaps they're still writing the copy.</comment></comment>


Someday tech will end our dumb two party system - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/11/someday-tech-will-end-our-dumb-two-party-system/ <comment> vezzy-fnord Good luck subverting Duverger's law, tech.

(Also much of the reason for SOPA not passing was the stake tech companies had in the game, not so much your J. Random Citizen.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, it proves true over and over. I think his goal was to give it a shot, but more than anything get people talking. I doubt he really thinks he's going to win.</comment></comment>